Saturday, April 23, 2016

RUSSIAN JUSTICE

Russian justice is an oxymoron on scale with Russian truth
and Russian news. It is arbitrary,
fictional and serves the Kremlin’s purpose only. Any Ukrainian falling into
Russian hands who is viewed as having potential to politically damage Ukraine
is in great danger.

The highest profile is Nadiya Savchenko,
who has been in Russian prisons since June 2014 and has been sentenced as of
March 2016 to 22 yearsin prison ostensibly for murder and illegally crossing into
Russia. She is a Lieutenant in the Ukrainian
Army, Iraqi war veteran and Mi-24 attack helicopter pilot. She was fighting as an infantryman with the
Aidar Battalion against the Russian proxies in Donbas when she was captured and
showed up three weeks later in a Russian jail.

She was accused of acting as an artillery spotter and deliberately
calling fire on the journalists Voloshin and Kornelyuk out of hatred for Russians. Just exactly whose fire killed them and the
circumstances under which they were in that location might be questioned. The Russian proxies have been accused of
deliberately putting expendable journalists into dangerous positions so their
deaths can be blamed on the Ukrainian ATO. This included a BBC
crew that were filming at Donetsk Airportafter it was captured by the Russian
proxies when suddenly their handler delegation disappeared and mortar fire
started dropping around them, from Russian controlled territory. They got out just in time

The fact that Savchenko’s mobile phone calls prove she was
nowhere near enough to the place to call fire on it AND that she had been
captured an hour previous to the shelling cut no ice with the judge. The man who said he captured her, “Ilim”
(Andrei Tikhonov), a soldier for “Lugansk People’s Republic” admitted
in a recent interview with Meduza, that he captured her before noon on
June 17th. However, he was not called to
the witness stand or even interviewed by the investigators.

Then there is 73-year-old Yury Soloshenko,
arrested in Moscow and sentenced to six years in a maximum security prison for
spying. He is suffering from a severe
heart condition and has just been diagnosed with cancer but is in a regular prison
cell and unlikely to see his kids or grandchildren again.

Soloshenko is the
retired director of the long-bankrupt Poltava-based Znamya factory which once
specialized in high-frequency electro vacuum lamps used in anti-aircraft
warfare. The factory had always depended for its survival on orders from
Russia, meaning that there was nothing secret between the two countries, with
it all a single system. The FSB, however, claimed and a Russian court
accepted that Soloshenko had been in August 2014 in Moscow “when trying to
illegally purchase secret components for S-300 surface to air missile systems
which were supposed to reinstate Ukraine’s air defense system.

He was not allowed the lawyer of his choice. The Russian state forced a lawyer on him who persuaded
him that if he pleaded guilty he would be returned to Ukraine.

Mykola Karpyuk and Stanislav Klykhwere arrested in Russia in March and August 2014 under
murky circumstances. They were held
incommunicado for long periods, with Klykh only able to see a lawyer of his
choice after 10 months in detention, and Karpyuk after almost a year and a
half.

According
to Russia’s investigation,
at the beginning of 1990 in Ukraine a radical right wing “UNA-UNSO” militant nationalist
organization, one of the goals and objectives of which was opposition to the
Russian authorities in any form and destroying Russian nationality”.

They
claim that in the period from December 1994 to January 1995 Karpyuk and Klykh
together with other members of the gang repeatedly participated in combat
clashes with soldiers of the Armed Forces in the territory of the Presidential
Palace, “Mynutka” area and railway station of Groznyi town, during which at
least 30 soldiers were killed and at least 13 were injured.

They
claim that in the period from December 1994 to January 1995 Karpyuk and Klykh
together with other members of the gang repeatedly participated in combat
clashes with soldiers of the Armed Forces in the territory of the Presidential
Palace, “Mynutka” area and railway station of Groznyi town, during which at
least 30 soldiers were killed and at least 13 were injured.

The two men also confessed that they committed these
terrible ‘crimes’ together with Ukraine’s ex-Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk
and a number of other Ukrainian politicians. All of this nonsense was publicly
repeatedas fact by the head of
the Russian Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin.

Both men retracted
their so-called ‘confessions’ as soon as they had contact with a lawyer, and
both have given detailed accounts of the torture they say was inflicted in
order to obtain the testimony.

Klykh was in L’viv writing university exams at the time,
while Karpyuk was caring for his dying mother.
Neither have ever been to Chechnya. Of the 30 men they are supposed to
have killed, 18 were killed in a place other than where the crime supposedly
took place and 11 did not die of gunshot wounds.

However, the prosecution does not give up easily. Hired thugs terrorized defense witnesses to
keep them from testifying, documentary evidence is refused to be admitted,
including Memorial Human Rights Centre analysis of the 30 Russians allegedly killed
by the defendants. Confessions to fictitious
heinous crimes are read out in court in spite of the fact that the men are not
charged with them. Allegations regarding torture were not allowed, though the
men still bear the scars.

Klykh’sextremely
disturbed behaviourduring court
hearings before he was finally removed would only confirm his account of having
been given psychotropic drugs over a long period. Despite application for
an independent psychiatric examination, Russian medical personnel found nothing
wrong with Klykh, and on April 4, criminal proceedingswere initiatedagainst him for allegedly ‘insulting’
the prosecutor.

One of their lawyers has also
been charged with insulting the judge.

Serhiy
Lytvynov, a 33-year-old
village cowherd from Luhansk Oblast near the Russian border, has been convicted
and sentenced to 8 ½ years in a maximum security prison, for an imaginary crime
after charges of imaginary war crimes were forced to be withdrawn.

He had gone to a Russian hospital
across the border to deal with an abscessed tooth. He was seized and savagely tortured until he
confessed to rape and murder of 39 civilians including old women and young
girls. This was given wide coverage on
Russian TV as “proof” of the Ukrainian genocide against Russian-speakers in Donbas.

Once he got a lawyer he retracted
his “confession” as given under torture. This would not have stopped the judge
but the lawyer also proved that the alleged victims did not exist and that the
addresses given for them were also fictitious.

Since Lytvynov had already been
in jail for a year, they now charged him with armed robbery of a Russian
national, Alexander Lysenko, who reported this armed robbery one day after the
war crimes charges were thrown out and over a year after it allegedly happened.

Lytvynov and two unidentified others supposedly
burst into the house where Lysenko was staying, with a machine gun. They beat him up and stole his two cars, a
Lada and an Opel. There is no record
that Lysenko legally entered Ukraine, nor is there any record that he owned the
two cars in question. In fact the motor
registration bureau said he did not and that the Lada registration had been cancelled
many years ago and reissued to a Zhigulu.

Lytvynov is no
political prisoner in any normal sense of the word and would scarcely be able
to explain what is happening in the country. He can, however, and has
vividly described the torture he was subjected to. He is equally adamant
that he had never set eyes on Lysenko or set foot in the place where this ‘robbery’
is alleged to have taken place.

This post does not even begin to cover the events in Crimea
and the war against the Tatars, nor those arrested and convicted of imaginary
charges such as Crimean activists Oleg
Sentsov, Alexander Kolchenko, Oleksiy Chyrniy, Gennadiy Afanasyev).

4 comments:

this makes me so angry..the Russians were know for their revolutions and I don't understand why they don't again..the army could turn and help arm the people..or do I not know jackshit about this..but judas priest..how much are they and other countries they are trying to take back supposed to take? sigh*

We have met the Enemy

Proud to be Ukrainian

About Me

Father, husband, agricultural consultant, beef cattle specialist, dog owner, reluctant gardener, amateur photographer, history buff and wandering soul who has at last found home and happiness in Ukraine. Fully registered as a permanent resident, who unfortunately looks like his passport picture, I am here for the foreseeable future, having married the “only woman in Ukraine who does not want to move to Canada”. I do miss my kids terribly, though Tanya’s family including two granddaughters make up for it somewhat.